MIFF Session #4: ARABIAN NIGHTS Vol. 2 THE DESOLATE ONE

Having established his blend of folktale with folks' tales in the first part, Gomes amps up the mix with a tighter weave and more compelling narrative. We follow the flight of a fugitive through open country as he is pursued by drones and mounted police but gets in a few legend-building encounters along the way. A beautifully staged trial takes place in an open amphitheatre with a case that unfolds from a simple confessed misdemenour to a massive series of crimes of opportunity in which the entire assembled public seems to be culpable. And, finally, a dog's eye view of the intertwined lives of the dispossessed in a huge council housing complex. If Volume 1 was a raw statement of the state of Gomes' native Portugal in the numbing wake of the GFC than Volume 2 is here to cleanse with comedy and anger with awareness.

Immediately, Gomes' use of the living landscape and the place of the people who tread it reminds us of the powers he showed in his magnificent Tabu. It is a novelist's rather than a painter's landscape, though, as we see the fugitive Simao Without Bowels interact with it as a wrongdoer, shelter seeker, patriarch and hostile agent. His own knotty, lived-in face is as much part of the land as the animals he encounters and the farming people he bullies but must rely upon. We don't just admire the scenery, we are part of it. Scheherezade's narration, continuing from the first volume, guides us through.

We are similarly drawn into the court case sequence that forms the middle section by a series of quick reveals that alert us to our own assumptions. These are too good to spoil but they lead on to the female judge finishing that opening through her side of a phone call in which she doles out some severe pragmatic advice to her daughter. The judge then turns to her curious court composed of casually dressed contemporary citizenry in masks. Gomes shoots this very conventionally, allowing us to see what we need to to follow the increasingly complex web of misdeeds that engendered those whose accounts precede them. This straightness of approach is necessary as before we know it we are not just listening to testimony from ordinary people but that of genies, cows, thieves who seem to have escaped from a Goya painting, and onward to greater and more fantastic as the backward flow of cause and effect seems to exonerate one miscreant by the gravity of the deed that compelled it. While at times this threatens to collapse into cuteness it is never allowed to as we understand how thin the divide between the farce and grim reality: the masks aren't there to conceal but reveal.

Finally, in the housing complex, we follow Dixie the poodle and her owners, an ageing couple who are ready with gossip and observation for any who can lend an ear. We hear and see the stories of a large range from their neighbours' lives, a quirk here, a tragedy there and more particoloured folly than you could fit into a Renaissance bookplate, and we see the amiable and blameless Dixie, beloved and loyal, handed between owners as their circumstances fail them and her. Dixie's final encounter with companionship is delivered with the same poker-faced sentimentality that coursed through Tabu and like that, it works wonders. We don't need to cry, the judge already told us why, and we don't. We're allowed a little sadness but, mostly, a frown of recognition.

As I followed this far more digestible volume in the trilogy I noted how much it had in common with what I like about the best of Bela Tarr's films, the sections of Satantango or Werckmeister Harmonies that wrested me from my cinema seat and cast me into the picture. I felt no more ashamed of remembering my frequent boredom with the first volume two nights before (it is subtitled The Restless One) than I was at some of the more interminable long takes Tarr commanded me to endure so I could experience everything. That is, what Gomes wants us to do here, experience everything. With reservations I'll say I'll try.

MIFF Session #2: Arabian Nights Vol. 1 The RESTLESS ONE

Portugal in hard times. We begin in the Viana shipyards, empty but for former workers  hanging around like ghosts as diembodied voices of the retrenched talk about their working lives, what their labour made and how little that seems to matter. A brief interlude in which the writer/director, Migueal Gomes, sits on a cold cafe table realising that the twin themes of the shipyard closure and the industrially proportioned local wasp plague don't quite gel. He flees with his crew in chase.

This is expectable from his previous feature Tabu which had much to say on his native Portugal's history as a coloniser and said it with great stylistic charm. But we are not here to smirk at quirk. Gomes wants the stories of the disaffected and disenfranchised to be heard, one after the other. Well, Godard already did that so the way to do it now is to place it against a kind of retelling of the Arabian Nights, a series of tales told by a woman to keep herself alive with the clever idea of leaving them unfinished to keep her potential despatcher at bay.

And that is what we get here. Anecdote after anecdote of productive lives weakened by economics and government austerity. The folk tales promised by the title do appear but it is in a kind of weave that forms frames for the more contemporary accounts. This blend of the fantastical and grim day-by-day doesn't always divert but the intention of giving the stories air and light is never less than sincere.

The problem is that almost all of these are told as tableaux, the focus is kept medium to wide, so that we are enduring rather than joining these folk in their hardship. I waited in my seat for the film to burst into the kind of cheeky panache Gomes showed in Tabu but each time it did, it fell back like a wave and tossed us into the surf again.

I struggled to maintain interest in this demanding show, falling into hypnogogic riffing every few minutes (not helped by the sonorous buzz coming from the guy in the row in front). Leaving the cinema, I was encased in a freezing rain which woke me up in seconds and, splashing my way home, I realised I had to rethink the resentment I had just been feeling while in front of this. I clung to the moments of flash, vowed to sympathise with the testimony of economic victims and frowned on planning to change my schedule, leaving the final two chapters for someone else. But, no, now I can't wait to see them. As droney as it got there yet was wonder.

Review: TABU

This film makes three declarations in its firs few seconds.

The first is that it will be in black and white, an aesthetic choice made by filmmakers since the seventies to suggest the past. The second declaration is that the frame is the old fashioned academy ratio (4X3) which consolidates the first, we're not invited back with the comfort of contemporary cinema's panoramic width, we're going to be up close and personal in the frame of vintage movies.

The third declaration is that the image of a pith-helmeted European man standing still in the glare of the African bush is going to be staying there, centre frame for a few long screen minutes. We will be asked for our concentration, patience and even indulgence.

Vintage look and feel, intimacy and indulgence? Sounds like memory to me and that is indeed where we'll be going. The explorer in this introductory sequence is heading for a particular waterhole. He is haunted by phantom of his wife who speaks to him glumly. He takes his exploration party of locals to the waterhole and jumps in. Next we see a crocodile at night, reptilianly still, described in the explorer's voiceover as melancholy. Is it his reincarnation?

After the titles we move to contemporary Lisbon. Part 1: Paradise Lost. Middle aged Pilar mixes the leisure of her days (we first see her at the cinema) with acts of conscience and kindness, joining protests, offering accomodation to overseas students, and prays for all who concern her. A retiree, she finds her days thanklessly lonely but moves through them with a visibly tiring resiliance.

She worries about the old lady in the next apartment, Aurora, whose slight battiness (variously praising and defaming her live-in maid, Santa) is tempered by an active imagination. She speaks of days in Africa in what sounds like whimsy and wishfulness at once and tells brilliantly of the dream that led her to gamble most of her savings away. When Pilar only incompletely succeeds in offering Aurora help she applies to the taciturn Santa for help with a success that only the very patient would recognise. Circumstances lead to Pilar tracking down a man from Aurora's past whose recollections prove the stories of Africa and tell of forbidden love between the man and Aurora.

Part 2: Paradise is told in pictures and voiceover as Aurora's lover, Ventura, tells the tale of their affair in the world of plantations and local strife. The film stock seems to have changed to something grainier than the deep clarity of the first part, more like the antique look of the introductory tale. There is ambient sound (wildlife and weather) and music but no voices but Ventura's narration and the younger Aurora's letters. The acting is not the jokey silent exaggeration of The Artist but naturalistic and the effect is like having home movies narrated by their maker. Except that these go where home movies do not.

The young Aurora's beauty has a radiance that only carefully lighted black and white photography can deliver. Without the distraction of colour we can more clearly relish her luminous eyes and patrician facial structure. Ditto for the younger Ventura whose thinner Deppishness also seems to seek the light. No narration is needed to show the immediacy and danger of their mutual attraction.

The crocodile as pet (unsubtle but still potent symbol of the wildness of the lovers) the always uneasy mix of displaced European culture among the Africans who are getting clearly sick of them, the odd blend of the beauteous nature and brutal humanity and the overriding guilt make for a potent pot that yet feels like a light and nourishing repast when it might easily have been a big bloat. I suspect that this effect is a kind of texturing on the part of writer/driector Miguel Gomes who has managed to regard his tale and scoop out anything too weighty that can be supplied more intuitively. While this means a little substance might be lost it also results in easier digestion. The trope of omitting direct dialogue and letting narration take its place might have been fatiguing but as the writing is so spare and the visual material so varied from rich to feathery the overall effect is of crafted poetry rather than assembly line cinema.

There is a little of the tweeness of magical realism in (at least the translation) the statements of the narration but considering we are given a film as signature as the best of Bela Tarr (Werckmeister Harmonies) or Roy Andersson (Songs from the Second Floor) or Luis Bunuel (too many but Belle de Jour is a good starting place). There is an ache to Tabu that I have long missed in the movies that I see. The ache is a pleasant one, the slight burn that appears on a memory when the sense lifts the nostalgia out of the way and we begin to examine what is really there. Even if we still can't look at something painful or touch whatever remains toxic there is yet some comfort: we've noticed it again; it hurts but we no longer pretend it never was.

I need to see this again.